Until I Find You
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Until I Find You is a 2005 novel by John Irving about a Canadian actor named Jack Burns. Sprawling across Canada, a large part of Europe and the United States, Until I Find You uses many of the themes and plot devices that have already seen treatment in other works by the author. The first half of the narration follows a young Jack Burns through his youth as he travels with his mother in search of his father through the subculture of tattoo artists. Like the title character in The World According to Garp and Irving himself, Jack finds a talent for wrestling and an extended family that aids and hinders him through his trials as a young man coming of age, including his sexual awakening and abuse as an adolescent. The second half of the narrative sees Jack on a road to discovering the truth behind the misconceptions that his younger self had thought he understood.
[edit] Trivia
In the book, Jack earns the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999. In reality, this award went to John Irving himself in 1999 for his adaptation of his own book, The Cider House Rules. Additionally, Jack loses the oscar for Best Supporting Actor to Michael Caine, who also won for The Cider House Rules that year. [1]
[edit] Alternative comment
Complexity and great refinement makes John Irving's eleventh and longest novel a true achievement as a literary course expanding since 1968 and always growing into a better emotional and stylistic and moral machine. Alongside authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Auster, John Irving can be considered a major literary influence over the media world, like Fyodor Dostoevsky or Gustave Flaubert or Francis Scott Fitzgerald had been, an influence of a literary and philosophic dimension, very open and translatable. The biographical tone remembering Charles Dickens's David Copperfield deepens into auto analysis and general knowledge, sometimes learned, sometimes trivial and even media related and auto referential. American society is finely described through the education, the life styles, the cultures, the aspirations and the experiences of the characters. Also present are well known vision and description of European northern countries; the life of the famous and cool; religious feelings; erotica; transcendent situations; the absurd; deconstruction of the novel; storytelling. The three principal characters are Jack, the son growing into an actor; William, the absent father and very much tattooed church organist; Alice, the mother, a tattoo artist by family tradition. The characters are all marked for life, not inevitably by tattoos but also and mostly by other sentimental signifiers that grasp the memory, and even by words, actions and signs that are omitted, almost forgotten. --robert 16:47, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
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